Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/52

 II

WHAT IS CRITICISM?

QUESTION put in this direct way, as if from a text-book, is first of all entitled to a plain and elementary rejoinder, if one can be devised.

I even hope that in time some dialectician, as "absolute" as the Grave-digger in "Hamlet," will hit upon an exact reply to the question, What is Poetry? This so many idealists have failed to answer, because they feel and do not analyze; because they attempt by sentiment and inadequate analogy to produce in us their own feeling, rather than to define what is, after all, a human mode of expression and therefore within man's power to define. Feeling is "deeper than all thought," but when the poet Cranch tells us also that "thought is deeper than all speech," he is met by the poet Poe with the confession: "I do not believe that any thought, properly so called, is out of the reach of language. I fancy, rather, that where difficulty in expression is experienced there is, in the intellect which experiences it, a want either of deliberateness or method." He also observes that "the thought is logicalized by the effort at expression." For a dreamer and man of feeling, whose learning was none [38]